Test Automation Pitfalls (1)

Organizations make significant investments in Test Automation. However, few of them realize corresponding benefits from their investments.

Often, automation suites turn out to be expensive to create and subsequently maintain without being effective in unearthing defects. The natural question that gets asked is – Why ?

There are various factors, some of which include the following.

1. Quality of tests being automated.

"Garbage in, Garbage out” applies well to test automation. If your test automation is based on tests that are themselves of poor quality, then you can rest assured that your automation results will hardly be spectacular.

While analyzing issues with test automation, we must examine the underlying tests and their design. For most organizations, their test automation goal is to automate 100% of their existing manual tests. While it may be a challenge to reach this goal, especially in larger and complex projects, the usefulness of such a goal is debatable. Unless you have a good set of tests to automate, merely trying to convert all of your manual tests to automated ones, does not offer much benefit. The exercise could very likely incur significant investments of time and resources while yielding little effective returns.

Quoting Mark Fewster - “It doesn’t matter how clever you are at automating a test or how well you do it, if the test itself achieves nothing then all you end up with is a test that achieves nothing faster.”